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Today's flight path

My natural wanderlust extends to airborne endeavours, and I knew that I’d be frustrated flying around Dolphin Beach until the mist arrived there and shut things down completely, so I decided to fly over to Blouberg Hill and survey the options from there.  The hill peaks at about 700ft and features some old military ramparts, which are now being converted into nature reserve accommodation.  I used some ridge lift on the NW side for a free ride to the top and examined the options.  The sea fog looked as if it was thinning out to the north, and experience has taught me that while the sun shines if rarely makes much progress inland.  I’d already discovered (to my surprise) that there was very little turbulence over the hill.  I decided to venture a little further into the farmlands, make a big loop to which ever side felt good, and try my luck later with the fog at the beach – there are always plenty of landing options elsewhere for a PPG.

The PA125 engine was singing melodiously and took joy at every throttle input; my Eden 4 wing rippled gently with the pleasure of being caressed by the afternoon air.  Smells of the fields rose up as we skimmed along, seldom more than a few hundred feet and often below the treetops: Dust, cows, something tangy from a processing plant.  We skipped up over powerlines and settled down closer to the earth to admire stray buck and huge hares.  As the evening light grew richer, I began to notice the texture of the land that we miss when we’re terrestrial: the way vegetation changes in symmetry as you pass a small stream; the juxtaposition of man’s order on nature’s chaos; the lines we leave that endure and those that fade.  In one field, a plough had cut the symbol of infinity, and I wondered how long we’d continue to draw our sustenance from the soil.

After a while I realised that while I was becoming much more aware of where I existed, I had less idea of where I was.  My mapping GPS was two thousand miles away on another adventure, and dead-reckoning relies on less rumination and more navigation.  I raised mine eyes unto the hills and got a rough fix: somewhere between Philadelphia and Atlantis.  The air had become wonderfully smooth as the sun continued to sink and the light was becoming gentle, so I decided to venture into the Atlantis Dunes, a small tract of natural white-sand desert amongst the scrub.  It’s popular with the 4WD fraternity, but is also a great place to play with a PPG as the sand is forgiving if any low-level manoeuvres are unsuccessful.  This evening, however, it was popular with me for an entirely different reason: the poetry of patterns lit by the lowering light.

Bingo time arrived: not limited by fuel, but rather the waning sunlight.  PPG’s must be back on the deck by the end of civil twilight (15 minutes after sunset), and most of us assiduously avoid crepuscular calamities.  I turned to the south, still cruising low over the veld, and was rewarded with a sighting of a Fish Eagle perched at a small lake just north of the Delta 200 airfield.  The strip was deserted; I flew down the centerline of the runway and pretended to be a baby Boeing.  Koeberg Nuclear Power Station lay silhouetted against the fog off my right wing; the glinting high-tension powerlines branching out against the approaching darkness.

As I climbed back to the top of Blouberg Hill it became evident that the fog had asserted itself with vigour: the entire coastline was beneath it’s cold covering.  The beauty lay above.  Last rays of sunlight tinted the hills and vales of fog, turning it into an enormous eiderdown drawn up to keep the feet of Table Mountain warm against the encroaching winter.  I flew over my landing field: 200ft deep fog with no view to the ground.  Discretion won over valour and a bit of a walk, and I retreated inland to a school field beside the road.  After 2h28 minutes aloft and 98km distance I returned to leaving footprints, still trying to understand the patterns we create.

More images here:

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Section of the aeronautical chart showing the area and airspace

Great PPG flying on the West Coast today.  We met at Grotto Bay and flew north along the coastline to Yzerfontein – 30km of almost uninhabited and deserted beach, with the occasional wild ostrich for company.  After an extended coffee break at Yzerfontein to assess what the wind was doing (a NE land breeze meeting the forecast NW sea breeze) the general consensus was to head back to Grotto rather than chancing a flight to Langebaan.  Fortunately, help was at hand in the form of Dave, who offered to drive my Pajero as a support vehicle, and so I invited him to drive it all the way to Blouberg, said goodbye to the others at Grotto Bay and flew the whole stretch back in one go – more than 70km cross-country flight if you allow the small detour around the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station restricted airspace which I had to make.

Total track distance for the day’s flying was 115km; just under 3 hours and 10 litres of fuel.  The 70km/1h45 return from Yzer to Dolphin Beach burnt only 5 litres of fuel – probably on par with the average car

Least fun: the inland section through the D200 where I was crabbing crosswind  over fields of power lines in lumpy thermic air.

Best bits:  Flying at 30 knots a metre off the beach with a flock of seagulls as wingmen.

Some teaser pics – more words and some video to follow.

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Driving to SLP, just visible above the white car

The wind looked promising for flying at Sir Lowry’s Pass, where the highway from Cape Town exits over the Hottentots-Holland mountains to begin it’s route up the country’s east coast.  SLP ( as it’s colloquially known) offers a few different launch sites for paragliders and hang-gliders, with the main (but most tricky) site being at the viewpoint where the highway crests the ridge at about 450m ASL.  Here the wind is channeled through a gully, past several rock outcrops that have claimed their casualties over the years, and over a small eroded patch of grass barely large enough for one glider at a time.  A well-executed launch and nimble right bank allows one to soar the inevitable lift along the road and rail embankment and nearly guarantees an immediate climb to the ridge-top, where it can be remarkably thermic and long out-and-return runs are possible.  A botched lauch ends at best in an 8-minute glide out beyond the power lines to the landing field at the bottom of the pass; at worse one ends up adding your score in blood to the rocks.  For the more cautious, a friendlier top launch suitable for paragliders is about 15-20 minutes walk away; hang-gliders can carry 5 minutes down to a lower take-off below the highway.  I’m not convinced either of the ‘safe’ options add much real safety by the time you have factored in crossing a multi-lane mountain pass highway on foot…but that’s another subject.

Carrying gliders to the lower launch

Paul (another biwingual who mostly flies HG these days) and I met up in the landing area around midday.  The wind was northerly but going NW, and the forecast good.  We decided to use the bottom takeoff, which given the wind strength at the top was a good call.  The neatly trimmed fynbos on the steep launch has been growing back in force, which makes both rigging and launching a challenge, but after half an hour of toil I was ready to go – Paul, being a gentleman, uttered something to the effect of “Looks good: you can go first.”  It felt a tad silly to don three layers of clothing and then gloves and a pod and then stand there in the sun with little breeze waiting to launch fully expecting a sled glide to the landing field, as the wind seemed to have backed off.

Rigging at the launch area

I waited a few minutes for a promising cycle and then ran hard at the protea bushes a few meters ahead of me.  Bless her: the Sonic scooped me up and wafted into the air with ease.  My vario gave a delighted squeal as I banked left into the bowl and let the bar ease out from takeoff speed, and then settled into a steady beeping.  Climbing!  Within a minute all thoughts of a short flight were erased as we effortlessly left the ridge below and flew out into a good thermal.  I thought I’d test out the air while waiting for Paul to launch, but as I steadily climbed I set a lazy course west towards Gordon’s Bay and settled into the flight.  I could see his glider on the slope…clearly he’s still getting into his harness.

Approaching the end of the ridge, with the Gordon's Bay pump station (a PG launch site) visible on the left)

Despite not being a pre-frontal NW, the wind had a pronounced gradient, and at above 800m ASL on trim speed I found myself going backwards.  Paul’s glider was still on the ground, so I pulled in to a comfortable speed and carried on down to the end of the ridge, about 10km from takeoff.  The view was beautiful: Steenbras Dams and the Kogelberg mountains to my left, the whole of False Bay under puffy clouds to my right.  Flying accelerated along the ridge was tiring, however: the Moyes Sonic is not VG-equipped and maintaining a good speed requires a fair amount of input.  Also, my harness was not locking nicely in a prone position, which meant I had to keep pushing with my legs to stay flat.  Beyond Gordon’s Bay I decided to use some of the height flying out over the sea to the north and then looping back towards the ridge later, thus hopefully staying out of the stronger winds.  By now Paul’s glider was no longer visible, so I presumed he had launched and was chasing me.

Gordon's Bay from the air

Approaching cloudbase with False Bay laid out in front of me

The Helderberg Valley from 1000m ASL

One great thermal near Gordon’s Bay took me back to cloudbase, so I set off on glide straight for SLP.  Along the way Paul and I found each other; he’d been able to fly a lot quicker on his VG-equipped Airborne and had caught up easily.  Without radio comms (his is still in creation) we couldn’t discuss plans.  I thought I’d try a jaunt to the east to the big mountains, not knowing that he’d already been a few kilometers that way and had encountered a strong headwind and turbulence.  I met this with vigour to the east of the pass.  Somewhere in a rowdy thermal, my extra pressure on the kick-stap to maintain prone position snapped the cord, leaving me in a semi-upright high-drag position.  This is not pleasant for flying, adding considerable strain on the arms in the lumpy air.  One particular strap was also pressing into my upper abdomen, and after a few minutes I began to feel a little queasy.  After touching it out for  while I decided that it wasn’t fun anymore and headed down to the landing field.  It was still quite thermic on the ground, turning my landing approach into a dolphinesqe dance of blips and dips.  Paul saw me landing and thought it was due to a rush to get to work, so he came down too, perhaps more gracefully as the clouds moved in and the land cooled off.

Heading back to SLP

What a great day for flying.  Paul, who has flown HG at the site for many years, reckons it could have been a day to fly further down the coast, across Kogel Bay and all the way to Cape Hangklip.  Something for next time, certainly!  I’ve got some video clips which I’ll try get into a useful format ASAP…and will soon have to replace the sunken GoPro, as this kind of flying is not conducive to one-handed snaps!

The landing field at SLP. How does hang-gliding make you feel? The t-shirt says it all!

XKCD – “A comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.”

The byline should give you a pretty accurate idea of why I love XKCD; the dry quirky humour and occasional poignant cliffhangers tweak the chords of my soul. It’s usually irreverent, often irrelevant, sometimes requires me to hit Google or Wikipedia to understand (and learn something new) and occasionally lends a new perspective to something I’ve barely thought of before:

Go on, click the image to see it full size… brilliant.

If XKCD catches your fancy, it’s worth making a good pot of coffee and going right to the beginning of the archive and reading it all.  Armchair discovery between laughs and groans.  Oh, and don’t forget each and every mouse-over text.

Questionable Content

QC is a tale of 20-to-30-something existential angst in a world that is almost exactly like ours, except for some minor differences… like computer AI’s have become sentient and live amongst us as companions.  Some of the content is indeed questionable, but the characters are so beautifully delineated and have grown (and grown on me) over the years to the point that I can’t stop reading it.  You have to start at the beginning to have much home of understanding what’s going on…and have a reasonable tolerance for occasional profanity and butts.

Almost equally worth browsing is QC’s online store: where else can you buy a “Cogito Ergo Nom” T-shirt?

A Girl and her Fed

Boy-oh…how do I describe AGAHF?  Let’s see: A secret government research program into brain-implant chips crashes headlong into a few special people who can see ghosts and then ploughs through the paranoia workshop at a conspiracy theorist’s convention.  Don’t know how to brief you on the talking koala with a genius IQ.  Yet another comic that has been going for years and absolutely requires you to start at the beginning to have any hope of understanding what is going on, it is part political commentary, part action story with a philosophical treatise woven throughout.  Oh, and there’s humour.  Go figure.

While I’ve been reading these three for the longest (and most consistently), there are some great stories and webcomic out there to suit any taste.  Give it a go

SpeedFlying – France 2012 from bartoszplewa on Vimeo.

For the uninitiated, this is “Speedflying” – a crossover sport that amalgamates downhill skiing and paragliding.  The speedflying wings are very small (down to as little as 8m2, compared to around 26m2 for a normal paraglider) and are designed for speed and stability, with a large chord and narrow wingspan.  The very high wing loading (mass per unit area) combined with this profile means that the wings are very resistant to collapse, but they are also exceptionally responsive and lose dramatic height in turns.

Not all speedflying is done on ski’s: there are wings available for foot launching that have slower take-off and landing speeds, but trimmers allow them to be accelerated for descent.  They tend to be compact and light.  Another advantage is that they can be flown in stronger winds, allowing the hike-up-fly-down philosophy to expand into weather conditions not conducive to normal paragliding off mountain summits.  The big drawback is sink rate and glide angle: these are not cross-country machines.  I’ve flown the brilliant Ozone XT16 a few times, including soaring it at Dasklip Pass in strong winds that would prevented anything else launching.  Awesome.

The new classes of hybrids (somewhere between a speed wing and a paraglider) and miniwings (small wings with a normal paraglider profile) deserve to be watched with great attention by the mountaineering pilots…